Eric makes quite a good point about economic highs and lows having much less to do with the overall quality of the day's music than we're told, and how leisure music fits into it all.

But is Blur's Parklife a good example?

Put out in the spring of 1994, the album was a massive contrast to the music of the time. Where the rest of the world was invested in Seattle grunge or, say, Midlands grebo, Blur made Parklife, the second part of a trilogy, to fight back, for the most part, America.

"Enough," it said.

Not just to the Seattle sound, its dull and masculine working-class chic, but largely to our country's slow cultural and corporate takeover of Britain.

Earlier in the '90s, Damon Albarn would look out the window and couldn't tell what country he lived in anymore. Megastores. Fast food. Shopping centers. The nation as a brand. It looked like America.

This meant that it's absolutely true that Britpop and an album like Parklife had color and frivolity, or a sense of leisure. But it was also an angry and poisonous call-to-arms.

Sailing through a different historical British music genre with nearly every track, Parklife disguised a savage undercurrent and slipped it into the mainstream, offering songs about millennial apathy ("End Of A Century"), fetishizing of the United States ("Magic America"), and universal, stare-at-ourselves depression ("This Is A Low"), while even "Girls & Boys," one of the most joyous songs Blur has ever written, threw back to grunge-unfriendly gender experimentation, which America's music culture has rarely been comfortable with, and classic '80s synth-pop like Pet Shop Boys or Duran Duran, but updated it with cold-water-in-the-face asides of factory accidents and murderous STDs. Holidays were a scam. "Then it's back to work, A-G-A-I-N!" On the sleeve were photographs of a day at the races, but with vicious dogs.

As much as Parklife had the sound of joy, it seethed as much as it celebrated.

I think it comes down to a disparity of timelines. America and Barack Obama in 2008, you could argue, is Britain and Tony Blair in 1994.

If we're to look at Parklife as a sign of anything, it might not be a good one. Helping to run up to a cultural British left-wing renaissance after ages of seemingly unstoppable right-wing Thatcherism, Blur were one of the biggest bands that sounded like hope before New Labour sold everyone out.

The late '90s let-down that followed, Jon Savage, author of "England's Dreaming," has said — where the country watched the heroes become the enemies — somehow felt worse than all the long years on the sidelines. It didn't take long before the government disappointed everyone, the pop scene that Parklife stood for fractured, Britain was a dirty word again, and the world got stuck with fucking Coldplay.

No one, especially after America's latest clean start, wants history to repeat like that.